Yvonne Jocks is an award-winning author under all of her names—Evelyn Vaughn, Von Jocks,
and Yvonne Jocks. She lives in Texas with a healthy herd of distinguished pets and she writes and blogs every time she gets near a keyboard. This is her first appearance in Heart's Kiss.

A SOLITARY PATH

by
Yvonne Jocks

“I am so
sorry it didn’t work out with you and Joe,” said Judy. Which might have been
sweet if this weren’t the fifth time she’d said so.

Today.

Tobi looked
up from half-heartedly tracing a maze on a fast-food placemat. “Ya’ know, Jude,
I think you’re sorrier than I am.”

Judy
nodded, blonde and solemn. “You’re probably right.”

Tobi
groaned.

“Really! It’s
just…I hate to see you so alone.”

Now Tobi
groaned loudly. They were in a mall food court; she couldn’t spread her
arms out for fear of hitting another person.

Judy just
raised her voice. “You know what I mean. I’m so happy with Bill—what’s wrong
with wanting the same thing for you? Couldn’t you do a love spell or something?
You’re a witch, for heaven’s sake!”

Then she
said, “Oops,” because an elderly couple to their right started clearing their
trays. Of course, they might have simply finished eating.

“One,”
clarified Tobi, pointing her ball-point like a tiny wand, “some witches might
disagree with you there—rumor has it techno-pagans don’t take the Craft seriously
enough. Two, if I were still in the broom closet, I wouldn’t be wearing all
this pentacle jewelry, so no, you didn’t just ‘out’ me. And three, the best
part about dating Joe was it did make you happy. And Mom. And some folks
from work, several of whom apparently thought I was a lesbian.”

They added
in unison, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

“Which, by
the way, doesn’t make sense,” added Tobi, snitching one of Judy’s fries. “If I
were a lesbian I wouldn’t be dating nobody—I’d be dating women.
Still, though I love you all, I need a better reason than that to keep dating.
A better reason than making you happy, I mean. Not dating women.”

Judy shook
her head. “Better reason? How long were you dateless before you went out with
Joe?”

“Six years,”
Tobi admitted easily; it wasn’t like she hadn’t had offers. A gaggle of teenage
girls, one table back, blatantly stared. They hadn’t been surprised by a witch
at the mall, but they were shocked by celibacy? And yet from the leftover buns
on their trays—and the look of their bony arms—they were all on that no-carbs
diet. To each her own. “And I was perfectly happy,” Tobi added. “I’m still
happy—more than when I was dating the wrong guy.”

“Maybe it
just takes practice,” insisted Judy. As if dating, like sushi, were an acquired
taste.

“Or maybe
we both deserve something more clearly special.”

“But how
will you find special if you aren’t even trying?”

Simply
shaking her head wasn’t enough—Tobi buried her beringed fingers and her pen in
her curly brown hair to keep her head from exploding. “What I meant was, if
I end up with anybody, it should feel special. Special enough that we’ll find
each other without stressing about it. I’d rather not bother with anything less
in the meantime. It’s not like there’s a hurry. If we don’t catch each other
this time around, there’ll be other lifetimes.”

Judy
stared. “That kind of reasoning may be why the Church ditched the idea of
reincarnation in the 6th century.” Judy said “Church” with a capital “C”
because she was Catholic. But a liberal Catholic. Clearly.

“I’m not
wasting this life! I have my work, and my writing. I have Habitat for Humanity
once a month—and my religion.”

“Which you
practice alone.”

“I attend
some open circles.” But she’d observed Beltane, aka May Day, alone. And Spring
Equinox. And Imbolc. She’d had fun, too. Punxatawny Phil had featured
significantly in her February celebrations.

She’d
attended an open circle for Yule, anyway.

Unable to
comment on open rituals, Judy took another bite of her burger. Tobi returned to
the place-mat puzzle. Mazes were always most difficult when you tried working
from the outside in. “The right guy has plenty of opportunities to come along,”
she insisted. “Until then, why dwell on his absence—why empower it—by
giving up what I do enjoy?”

“Like
television?” Judy knew her too well.

“My
favorite magic,” agreed Tobi, trying a different entrance on the paper maze. “Why
ignore that, just to seek something that may be premature anyway?”

“What if he
is?” Some things she just knew—the same way she knew that words and stories had
power and that worlds existed beyond their own. But Tobi knew she could never
wholly explain it to Judy.

She wasn’t
sure she could even convince another witch!

Tobi’s
brand of techno-Wicca was eclectic, urban, and so firmly anchored to
pop-culture that some of the more traditional pagans she knew, locally and
online, dismissed her as a fair-weather witch…even after eight years.
Personally, though she understood the pagans’ concern about image, Tobi didn’t
get how a magic user could laud the power of the moment—the Now, Oprah viewers
would say—and yet scoff at fads. How could someone worship at the altar of
ancient myths—literally, even!—while dismissing a mass-media that wove new
mythology every day?

Very few
people, pagan or mundane, could hear Tobi’s theories about TV and
Dreamtime without questioning her sanity. Lacking substantiality, the astral
world was too often mistaken as lacking substance as well. Most magic didn’t
work merely by natural means. Sometimes it hid behind them, easily dismissed
against more obvious “realities.”

Busy with
everyday life, Tobi rarely thought about him—whoever he was—Mr. Special.
But when she focused into herself, she felt their connection as powerfully as
she felt the pull of Mother Earth right here in the splashing fountains and
ficus trees of the food court. She knew him as surely as she knew the presence
of Father Sky through the airy skylights, tinted against the worst of the
mid-western sun. Her Someone might not exist in this world…but worlds
overlapped. She didn’t need to find a wooded grove to commune with nature, and
she didn’t need a Friday-night date to feel loved.

By Whoever
He Was.

“I sense
him,” she said finally. “What if I settle for someone else, and I’m not
available when he shows up?”

“And if you
end up alone?” There Judy went with her one-path-to-happiness paradigm.

“One, there
are worse fates than staying single. Two, I’m not alone. I have friends, family…my
cat. I’m not altering my life for anything less than magic. And yes—” Tobi
raised a flat hand to fend off more concerned protests. “I realize that a
relationship isn’t all magic. But doesn’t the magic have to be there at some
point, at least early on? Just a little toe curling, just a little
‘Yay, I’m going to see him tonight’ shivers?” Just a little swelling
background music as their eyes met? “If not, why bother?”

Now it was
Judy who groaned. “I reserve the right to worry. Especially with you coming and
going at night all the time, and that mugger running around loose.”

“Two
attacks in four weeks hardly constitutes a crime wave.”

“If you
were still dating Joe, you could call him if you heard someone breaking in.”

Tobi
doubted anybody would break into her third-floor home, especially considering
how many wards she’d placed around it. She also had good, solid, mundane locks.
“Or here’s a thought. If I hear someone breaking in at night, I could call the
police.”

“I just
worry, is all,” insisted Judy. Again. “Promise me you’ll be extra careful until
this guy is caught, okay?”

Tobi felt
so relieved that the issue had moved off her love life, she was happy to
comply. “I promise.”

And as
their conversation turned to Judy’s new position at work, Tobi smoothly
completed the paper maze—by starting at the center and tracing her way out.

Not every
path had to be fumbled down by trial and error, did it?

#

She should
have had better sense than to watch the news the next night. But it came on
after her favorite show. Tobi hadn’t wanted to disturb the almost sensual
satisfaction of a good story—or the purring cat in her lap—by getting right up.
Next thing she knew, she was watching a report on a third mugging in the area.

Her area. The
TV station’s map-graphic showed that all three had taken place within a four
mile radius of her.

Peachy.

A rune-pull
didn’t prophesize full-out danger, but it recommended action be taken. So did
her Magic 8-Ball. So Tobi did what any smart witch would do—she called her boss
to ask about a shift change. Yes, it was a little late at night, but they were
friends.

Some
witches kept a low profile to avoid very real bigotry and persecution. With
Steve, Tobi instead endured a weird kind of enthusiastic teasing. She guessed
it was better than him tricking her into attending a church revival, like the
head of finances had done.

“Natural
means, Steve,” she reminded him patiently. “You’ve got to act in accord.
Any witch who does magic and then ignores it to wander around at midnight
wearing a T-shirt that says Mug Me isn’t grasping that particular
concept.”

Actually,
midnight—the big Between-Time—might prove safe. But not three-thirty in the
morning, which was when she generally got home from her part-time job answering
auto-club distress calls for a White Knight service.

“Oh yeah,”
said Steve, remembering. “Like the big-screen TV.” Though no witch, he’d once
played with a spell to afford a big-screen TV, and ended up with three straight
weeks of overtime. Well, it had paid for the television…but it also
explained why a TV-addict like Tobi got by with a clunky analog television,
made watchable with basic cable, magic or not.

He said, “Look,
I can ask around, but it’ll be tricky. Not everyone loves the graveyard shift
the way you do.” He’d made plenty of jokes about that, too.

“Just see
what you can do on your end,” said Tobi. “I’ll see what I can do on mine.” She’d
promised Judy…and to break her promise would be to weaken the power of her
word.

“You got
it. Hey, Tobi?”

She waited.

“You do be
careful, okay? I know Stanley doesn’t like the idea of work-at-home, but this
is the 21st century; we can rig something. You don’t need to be
driving in every night if you don’t feel safe.”

Now she’d
promised her safety twice. After hanging up, the idea of working protective magic
lingered. She felt completely safe in her apartment. She’d warded the place
with a bubble of protective blue light—blue on the astral plane, anyway—powered
by a centrally located crystal. She had hidden black onyx, also protective,
near each doorway. She’d charged a household guardian to safeguard her home—it
was her childhood teddy bear, whom she felt certain had a big bear spirit. And
hello? Third floor. Nobody had ever broken in. She doubted anybody would. But
what about when she was walking in from her car—the time when, according to the
news, women were most vulnerable? The Magic-8 Ball had warned her: Outlook
Not So Good.

And Tobi
had no reason to believe that the Powers That Be couldn’t use kitchy plastic to
communicate.

Always glad
for a reason to explore her collection of magic books—most of them paperbacks—Tobi
settled on the carpeted floor of her dining alcove between her bookshelves, her
altar, and her microwave, and she started skimming. A protective talisman? Couldn’t
hurt. Perhaps a binding spell on the mugger?

She
considered that one before rejecting it. The temptation was to go Warrior Witch
and try protecting the whole damn city, but she knew better. One, she didn’t
have enough information; too many variables existed for proper control. Two,
she doubted she could handle it; even a Warrior couldn’t protect the whole city
single-wandedly. And three, nobody had asked her. Unlike, say, the sisters on Charmed,
Tobi had never been given the responsibility of protecting humankind in general…and
a lucky thing for humankind that probably was. Nope, pretending that magic made
her omnipotent would be condescending and dangerous.

Better to
do something she could fully control. As if to confirm her decision, her book
fell open to the perfect spell. “A thought form,” she told Sophie, her cat. “Of
course!”

Like
archetypes with jobs, thought-forms were creations who took on a level of
reality through the focused belief of humans. For magical purposes, they were
generally envisioned, charged with a specific job, then dismissed with thanks
once that task had been accomplished. It was the closest Tobi could come to the
faithful, imaginary friends of her childhood. The more she studied Wicca, the
more she came to believe that “imaginary” was just another way of saying, From
Other Realms…

…and that
magic was a way of accessing them.

#

“Thought
form, huh?” asked Oz, as in The Great and Powerful. It wasn’t his real name. He
ran the Shop-a-Spell store in a local strip mall. Tobi wasn’t sure what magic
shops were like in New York or California, but here in the urban Midwest, the
Shop-a-Spell had two full walls of windows and enough stained glass and
prism-refracted sunlight to satisfy Ra and Apollo put together—not to mention
Iris, goddess of rainbows. “I like it. Very you. Have you decided on
specifics, yet?”

The more
clearly one envisioned a thought-form, after all, the more likely it was to
succeed in its task.

“At first I
thought I’d hitchhike my spell onto an existing character,” admitted Tobi. “The
more people who believe in him, after all, the stronger he’ll be…and you’ve got
to admit, the idea of having, say, Jayne from Firefly or Ares from that
old Xena show patrolling my parking lot is pretty cool.”

Oz widened
his eyes.

“I know,”
she said with a laugh. “Neither a mercenary or the God of War is the best
poster-child for Harm None. Besides, a thought form empowered by hundreds of
thousands of people should probably be used for magic meant to help more than
one witch, so I’ve decided to work from scratch.”

“I think
that’s wise,” agreed Oz. “So you want something to time out about a month’s
worth of rent-a-guardian, huh? I’ve got just the thing.” And he led her toward
the back of the store.

Oz looked
more like a grizzled old biker than a witch—complete with a long gray braid and
tattoos. A biker wearing two pentagrams, a triskel, and a Thor’s Hammer
pendant. But he kept good stock, and he knew his magic.

As Tobi
passed a cluster of twenty-somethings by the “Ceremonial Magic” shelves, one of
them sniggered, “Nice shirt.” Two more laughed and hushed him.

She was
wearing her Bewitched shirt, showing a curvy, blonde cartoon witch on a
broomstick.

“I was
gonna say the same thing,” agreed Oz, raising his voice. But he meant
it. “Where’d you find it?”

“I’ll send
you the link,” she offered. “I also put together a desktop theme. It plays the Bewitched
song when I boot up, and whenever I execute a file, it makes that tinkling,
nose-wiggle noise.”

“Does it
call for Dr. Bombay when you get an error message?”

She
laughed. “No, but I like that idea.”

“My
coveners and I noticed something you can maybe explain.” He kneeled beside some
shelves and started opening the drawers underneath, where he kept some of his
overstock. “The men in those old shows never want the women—like Samantha or
Jeannie—to use their magic. What’s with that?”

“Oh, there’s
a definite patriarchal subtext there! But have you noticed they aren’t
doing it anymore?” When he glanced up at her, quirking a shaggy eyebrow, she
added, “Well, yes, Darren Stevens and the Master are; they’re stuck in the
celluloid past. But even on Charmed, none of the men seemed to ask the
witches to give up their powers. Sometimes they were even the cheering section.
It makes me proud to be a couch potato.”

“The times,
they are a’changing.” He’d gone back to digging, and whooped in triumph,
handing her a large, colorful square of silk. She lifted it up by two corners,
admiring a stylized picture of a medieval night, painted over an odd design
that looked both geometric and ancient.

“Niiice,” she
admitted, though unsure what he meant her to do with it. “The dragon on his
coat of arms is a cool touch.” In old stories, dragons often symbolized
paganism. Thus when St. George slew England’s dragon…well.

But this
knight was obviously pro-dragon.

“That whole
batch had the cheapest dye job I’ve ever seen,” admitted Oz, standing with
creaking knees. “If you tie it outside, like a knight’s standard, by time the
month’s through it’ll be sun-bleached to obscurity. That’s when you’ll know to
release your guardian.”

“Perfect!” Odd…she’d
been using that word a lot in regards to this project. When the bell rang from
the counter, Oz headed toward the front to wait on his other customers and she
admired the scarf a little more. A knight—that certainly fit the role she was
asking her thought-form to play. Silk was a natural fabric, and woven! The idea
magic as spell-weaving had always appealed to her. Her instincts said, Go
for it.

Up front,
Oz was ringing up the purchases for the twenty-somethings. One of them was
critiquing a flyer for an open Midsummer Ritual, out by the lake. “They didn’t
know what they were doing,” he said. “At Beltane, the guy who dismissed the
South blew out the quarter candle.”

“No!”
exclaimed the girl beside him.

He nodded
and rolled his eyes. Tobi noticed another customer, a young businesswoman,
watching from near the selection of tarot cards. Once the witchier-than-thou
group had left, the younger woman asked Oz, “What’s wrong with blowing out
candles?”

“Some
traditions consider it an insult to the element of fire.” Oz took the scarf
from Tobi and tapped the cost onto his adding machine, then calculated tax. “Or
the element of air. I forget which. Maybe both.”

“Elements
can get insulted?”

“Some
practitioners think so,” said Tobi. “Maybe they’re right. But those guys are
probably newbies, still looking for that One True Path. When you’re just
starting out, you take everything so seriously.”

“Luckily
for me, fire isn’t all that picky,” Oz said with a grin, accepting the money
she handed him. “Now, water….”

“Talk about
your moody elements!” Tobi and Oz nodded wisely together.

The girl
looked from one of them to the other. “You’re goofing me.”

“Yeah,”
admitted Oz. “We are. But I think it’s a sign from the Universe that
Tobi should celebrate Midsummer by the lake.” He even tucked a yellow flyer
into her package before handing it over. “At least she knows those guys won’t
be there. And we’ll have labyrinths.”

That caught
Tobi’s attention. “Like in the David Bowie movie?”

“Actually,
that one was more of a maze…most labyrinths are simply drawn on the ground and
walked for meditative purposes, not solved. But they’re really something.”

“I’ll think
about it,” she hedged, accepting her change.

She’d
decided to be a lot more careful with her promises.

#

Tobi’s
thought form would be a man, envisioned and then asked to patrol the parking
lot from one full moon to the next. She tried considering a woman instead—she
knew plenty of warrior goddesses who set a good example—but for some reason,
her imagination kept latching onto a man.

Maybe Judy’s
concerns about her not having enough male energy in her life were having an
effect.

He wouldn’t
actually materialize in front of her, of course. That was not how magic
worked. But if she envisioned him clearly enough, and charged him powerfully
enough, his very existence—even in a separate if interpenetrating realm—might
dissuade predators.

She took
several nights to plan him, jotting thoughts in the note app on her Smart phone
between calls at work, deleting as many qualities as she kept. The last time
she’d tried listing the traits of the perfect man, even before she’d become a
magic-user, she’d nevertheless drawn to herself a guy who possessed every
ingredient. He’d been handsome, charming, attentive, creative….

Unfortunately,
since she’d been doing it blind, she hadn’t remembered to add such qualities as
“responsible,” “loyal,” or even “honest.” Be careful what you wish for….

“Responsible,”
she decided firmly, copying the list into her leather-bound Journal of Shadows.
She sat on the floor again, Sophie the cat stretched comfortably beside her,
Enya music surrounding her. Sometimes she remembered to turn off the TV.
“Honest. Alert.”

Wouldn’t do
to have a guardian who didn’t actually notice the mugger.

“Even-tempered.”
She didn’t want the police scraping the remains of the mugger off the asphalt,
either. Just in case.

Oh, and—duh.
She added something fairly important, pleased with how the milk-colored gel-ink
looked against the black pages of the journal. “Protective.”

The next
step was to decide what he looked like. The more clearly she pictured him, the
more surely he would exist on the astral plane. She knew he would have dark
hair, clichéd or not. He would be tall, with wide shoulders and a broad chest
and….

She laughed.
Unless he was patrolling the parking lot topless, not to mention corporeal, it
wouldn’t matter what his abs looked like. Although if she put him in a tight
shirt and well-worn jeans, it couldn’t hurt, either.

White
T-shirt, she decided. So that the mugger’s subconscious can better see
him.

Strangely,
despite how certain she felt about his hair-color and size, she couldn’t
envision the thought-form’s face. And normally she had such a good
imagination! She knew he would be handsome, at least to her own eyes…one of the
many advantages of an imaginary man. Still, she felt as if she were squinting
her third-eye to get a good look at someone, and he was ducking his face away
from her. Frustrated, she went through clippings from her “cute guy” file—where
she kept favorite pictures from magazines and catalogs—and found an image that
was, well…

Perfect.

The picture
fit so well that she wondered if she’d been subconsciously remembering it the
whole time…a possibility that in no way invalidated the effort she’d put into
him so far.

The
magazine picture, an ad for some kind of investment company, showed a
dark-haired man from behind, standing in heavy mist. He wore tight jeans and a
tighter shirt, just a little of his hard jaw visible over one broad shoulder, a
curl of dark hair hiding the rest of his face. The tagline read, What do YOU
Think is Out There?

He had a
cute butt, and she hadn’t even ordered that.

“It’s you,”
she whispered, holding the page, and her breath felt shallow even as her iPod’s
music swelled. She felt as if she knew this man, wholly and instinctively…and
as if everything she knew about him pleased her.

Maybe it
was a sign that this working was meant to be.

One of the
many benefits to having her own place—along with keeping her own hours and
watching whatever she chose—was that Tobi didn’t have to hide her tools from
roommates or parents or even disapproving spouses. She did, however, keep her
most sacred items in a carved oak cabinet, away from dust and sunlight. On her
night off, which she’d made sure was the full-moon, she opened the cabinet’s
doors to release a delicious cloud of scent, from incense and herbs and candles
and oils, and retrieved four well-used jar candles. They were in the standard
quarter colors—green, yellow, red, and blue—and she set them to four sides of
her living room to mark the directions of north, east, south, and west,
respectively.

Her coffee
table became her working altar. She lay a blue cloth with a pattern of gold and
silver stars over it, then set out her athame, her bell, and her spirit-candle.
Two artistically faceless figurines in white ceramic, male and female,
represented the divine forces of God and Goddess. It had taken her well over
the standard year-and-a-day after she’d discovered Wicca to move past the “collecting
cool props” phase of her individual study…by then, she’d collected quite a few.
She made sure now that the photograph model for her thought-form lay on the
altar, as well as the new scarf, washed in salt-water to cleanse any clinging,
left-over energies.

She turned
off the telephone ringer, turned her answering machine’s volume all the way
down, and lowered her halogen lamp to the barest of glows. A quick search of
her iPod brought up the familiar, instrumental soundtrack to Conan the
Barbarian, some of her favorite working music. She’d already showered and
now wore a sleeveless silk robe, which had come off a peignoir set but which
she reserved for magic. Usually a kitchen-witch, Tobi did not always go through
all this ritual to do magic, but tonight’s working felt far bigger than her
usual day-to-day charms.

Tonight
felt momentous.

Standing
straight in front of her altar, she stretched her arms out wide, her athame—a
distressed replica of an antique dagger—in one hand, reaching up and up until
it pointed to the ceiling. “It’s show time, folks,” she murmured softly, to
whoever and whatever might be listening.

The athame
seemed to quiver in her hand as she walked the perimeter of her circle. Even as
she set it back on the altar, before she’d lit quarter candles, Tobi felt the
air inside her sacred place—between and of all space and time—falling
heavy and still. It wasn’t just because she’d cut off the air-conditioner so it
wouldn’t startle her or blow out the candles.

“Element of
earth, power from the North, I call on you,” she stated clearly into the
shadowed room. “Be with me in my sacred circle.” Then she lit the green candle,
near the one houseplant that had ever survived her, and envisioned the fertile
energies of earth power gathering around her to that side of the room. When it
felt proper, she stepped to her right, under the wind-chimes that hung from her
living-room ceiling, by the yellow candle.

“Element of
air, power from the East, I call on you….”

And so on.
After the calling of the quarters, she requested her Lord and Lady attend her
circle as well. From the feel of the energies that began to thrum around her
and the delicious shiver up her spine, she could not doubt they’d assented.

Tobi had
done group rituals before. When they went well, the power was incredible…but
one fidgety or cynical group member could easily destroy the night’s magic. A
benefit to being a solitary practitioner was not having to worry about anybody’s
missteps but her own. This private circle in her living room felt safe as few
places could. The candlelight, the scent of copal, the gurgle of her
table-fountain to the West side of the room, the music—all combined with her
breathing exercises to ease her into a gentle alpha state…or, as she better
liked to envision it, to move into the world beyond worlds. It was a place she went,
after all…the same way somebody got on the phone or went online.

Kneeling on
the carpet before the altar, she let the world outside her circle fade as she
focused on the picture, then on the empty space beyond it. If her guardian were
just over six feet, that would put him…yes. Tobi could see exactly where he
would come to, standing against the opposite wall.

First she
envisioned his shape, slightly warping the reality around him like a
particularly good invisible-man effect in the movies. We can rebuild him.
Stronger. Faster….

She
repeated her breathing exercises, to better concentrate.

Visualization
was Tobi’s forte. After tweaking the shape of her creation—widening his
shoulders, remembering that men tended to taper down into their hips instead of
flaring out again—she needed only a few more breaths to lend him color and
substance. Dark hair. White shirt. Tanned arms. Tight jeans….

She could
picture the tight jeans very nicely. If only he were real….

“But he’s
not,” she reminded herself sternly, as if Judy were watching over her shoulder—and
knew her stupidity even as her image of him vanished to reveal only her wall,
framed photographs, doorjamb.

Catching
herself before she sent out any more negativity by cursing, she calmly and
firmly started over. One, steady breathing. Two, alpha state. Three, hulking
male form in her living room. Despite the negation—out loud, yet!—she recalled
him with surprising ease. Kneeling, she would have to look up to take him all
in—so she did. That made him seem even taller and more protective in her mind’s
eye.

It also
gave her an intriguing vantage on those imaginary jeans.

He is real, she kept
telling herself to the beat of barbarian drums, slowly perceiving the highlights
of his hair, the plane of his cheeks, five-o’clock shadow, eyelashes. He is
real. He may not be of my world, but here and now he is real….

Soon, his
shade stood before her as surely as if she were watching him on TV. Oh, she
could also see the doorway beyond him, the display of photographs through him.
He hadn’t materialized anywhere but in the astral realm and in her own
perception of it. But by focusing on his presence, not his absence, she could “see”
him clearly indeed. The way his dark eyes stared silently back at her, she even
felt his presence with her, in this sacred circle. She imagined the scent of
him, a faint mix of soap and musky aftershave. For a moment, it seemed almost
as if she could reach out across the altar and….

But no, she
had a spell to cast.

Claiming
the scarf, she lay it on the opposite side of the altar from herself, at his
feet—and saw that her thought-form wore brown cowboy boots. Who would have
thought? Then, sitting back, Tobi spoke what she’d written:

“I ask
thee, guardian, for a boon—

from now
until the next full moon.

Protection,
against anyone

Who means
me harm. Yet harming none,

I bid thee,
guardian, if you will

Patrol
these grounds against all ill

As long as
these, thy colors, fly—

Or if thou
won’t, bid me goodbye.”

Then she
waited. As her creation, he would probably do as she asked…but as soon as
something became real, it got free will. He seemed so very real, she
found herself holding her breath—then releasing it, relieved, when he shrugged
one shoulder and took an easy step forward onto the scarf. He had accepted.

At one
point during this recitation, angling her gaze upward and imagining his face,
she thought she saw a hint of smile. She liked it, liked the lips she’d
envisioned for him. If this weren’t the middle of a fairly hefty spell, she
might even smile back….

Tobi
suddenly felt glad that she’d limited his existence to a 28-day cycle…and
anxious to bind the spell!

“If this
working be correct,” she cautioned, “and allows others to be free, so I Will
it, so I Shape it, and So Mote it Be.”

And in the
blink of an eye—poof?—she was alone again. Well, alone except for the
masculine and feminine faces of God and the elements of Earth, Air, Fire,
Water, and Spirit. But no tall, broad-shouldered, fictitious hunk stood before
her.

She couldn’t
shake the idea that, just before vanishing into the standard, he’d winked at
her.

Wow!

She took
extra time to ground herself before thanking and bidding farewell to the Lord
and Lady, as well as the elements—“Go if you must, stay if you will.” As she
walked the circle again, envisioning the bubble of protective light receding
back into her athame, the air seemed to move again, to drop several degrees. It
had been warm in-circle. She’d been there awhile.

“My circle
is open yet ever it remains, within me and without.” Putting down the athame,
she allowed herself to stretch a bit, then gathered the scarf from where she’d
imagined her guardian stepping onto it. Into it.

It was such
soft silk. The stylized knight painted on it was dashing, and the faint,
geometric design behind him…was it a labyrinth? She almost hated to set it out
where it could fade. But that, too, was part of the spell, and a small cost
indeed. She’d asked the guardian to be with her one moon’s cycle, and that was
that.

So she went
out onto her apartment terrace, into the quiet, summer night, and tied the
scarf to the wrought-iron railing, where it moved slightly in the warm breeze,
in the cloud-shrouded moonlight. It was a romantic night, soft and heavy. “As
long as this standard flies,” she whispered, trailing her fingers across it, “So
may you walk.”

Good spell, she
thought, then shivered—her magic shiver.

A motion
from below her caught her attention.

For a
moment, Tobi felt self-conscious…maybe nobody could have heard her, but they
might wonder what she was doing on her balcony, well after midnight, in a
peignoir! But then she looked closer, and felt a different self consciousness—

—at the
glimpse of white T-shirt as a tall, dark-haired man rounded the corner of the
apartments beyond hers!

“Ho-ly
crap,” she whispered—and immediately regretted having said that out loud, in
case she empowered it!

#

Magic isn’t
supposed to work this way, she typed on her PC to Cybele, one of an
e-mail listing of Wiccan friends across the country who liked to call
themselves a cyber-circle. Cybele was the only one online to receive instant
messages when Tobi, desperate to unburden to another magic user, logged on.
That’s probably because Cybele lived in Hawaii. It was much earlier in the day,
in Hawaii.

The few
moments Tobi had to wait after typing a quick overview of her spell, before her
friend’s response scrolled across her monitor’s screen, felt like torture.
Then, accompanied by a harp-like strum of magical sound-effects from Bewitched:

CYBELE63: What
way, exactly?

Tobi
quickly typed, Creating real people! One thing to form/summon being from
pure energy. Other thing when it leaves footprints!!!

As soon as
the initial shock had allowed her to move—and she’d changed into something less
likely to get her arrested or jumped—she’d hurried outside to check. Not with
candles but with a really big flashlight. Nobody stopped by to see if she was
the mugger, which seemed a mixed blessing.

So had the
footprints.

Frankensteiny, she added.
Then she hit “enter” and waited.

CYBELE63: Just
because man you saw was real doesn’t mean he’s man you created. Maybe was
mugger.

Also not a
lot of comfort…. but, surprisingly, it was a little.

Tobi typed
the word that was so intricately linked with magic—a word that almost defined “natural
means.” Coincidence?

CYBELE63: Maybe
connected, but not your doing.

Tobi
considered that—and realized what was happening. One way to cope with magic was
fearful self-doubt. With power came responsibility. Gods knew enough B-grade
movies had pushed that little lesson—what if she had “meddled in powers beyond
her understanding?”

Frankensteiny
indeed, she thought.

A second
knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss magic as coincidence. She of all people
should remember the message of Between Times—that when magic was involved,
things could be coincidence and more.

Her
computer let out another harp-like chord.

CYBELE63: You
cast a circle?

Tobi typed,
Yes.

CYBELE63: You
clarified good of all & free will & harm none.

Cybele didn’t
even add a question mark, which soothed Tobi considerably. She wasn’t some
teenager practicing out of her first book-o-spells. She knew her magic couldn’t
create human beings, not unless other powers in the universe were involved—and
she knew her own actions had been careful and correct. So she answered, Yes.

CYBELE63: Don’t
give away power. Wait & see.

Tobi took a
deep breath, and whispered thanks for friends and fellow practitioners…and for
the technology that allowed her to contact one in real time, even if Cybele was
far away and they’d never actually met.

Thank you, she
typed. Merry meet.

CYBELE63: Merry
meet. Tell me what happens.

And they
signed off. When Tobi heard thunder in the distance—so much for her full moon—she
shut down her computer. As it closed Windows to the tune of Bewitched,
her outlook shifted from dismay to careful excitement.

What if
magic sometimes did work like that?

#

Tobi felt
tangibly aware of her thought-form when she woke the next day…though maybe she
should blame that on the dream she woke from. She couldn’t remember anything
concrete from it…uncaptured dreams faded even faster against “reality” than
unrecorded instances of successful magic. But the feeling of it lingered like a
full-body memory, a delicious sense of being safe, held…loved.

She
stretched in bed, luxuriating in that feeling, and then she sat up and thought,
He’s out there. And she smiled. She didn’t have to wonder. She just knew.

He was out
there, doing what she’d asked of him, and it felt…nice. It added something
pleasant to her day.

Later, when
she left for work, she cheerfully said, “Hello,” into the evening—and she would
not have been wholly surprised had somebody answered. She stopped by the
24-hour supermarket on her way home, and when she lifted her packages out of
the car, she half-expected her thought-form to step out of the shadows and help
carry the bags. Welcome Home, the energy at the edge of the parking lot
seemed to say.

“Thank you,”
Tobi said softly, fully aware of how crazy she would look if anybody were in the
parking lot at 4:00a.m. to hear her. She would look as crazy as people seemed
when talking on a mobile phone hands-free, she supposed, before you noticed the
ear-piece. As crazy as someone dancing and singing to music on a Walkman.
People who heard things others didn’t always seemed crazy.

“I’m glad
to be home.” And she blew a kiss toward the shadows, where he might be
standing, as she passed.

Oh, she
knew he wasn’t rea—NO! She knew that he was not of this realm.
That was as much disservice as she would do her creation. But it didn’t hurt to
enjoy the dream of him, did it?

It might
even empower his protective abilities!

After
changing into shorts and a tank-top, Tobi decided to read out on the terrace,
by candlelight, sometimes fingering the soft scarf that occasionally moved or
shifted against the railing where she’d tied it. It was a beautiful, gentle
night, the moon only one day past full. That had to explain how incredibly…fulfilled
she felt.

Two nights
later, she saw him again—just for a moment as she rounded the corner of her
car, and from the back. She still hadn’t seen his face except in her dreams—and
then she couldn’t remember it. But she felt pleased, all the same. She felt
safe.

She typed
regular reports to her witch list, who tuned in for daily updates as if Tobi’s
life had become Passions or The Guiding Light. She printed copies
for her own journal, and at one point drove by Kinko’s to make a color copy of
the picture of the man, from behind, in the mist. The tag-line made her laugh.

What do YOU
Think is Out There?

#

“Have you
got a new neighbor?” asked Judy when she came by, a week later, and Tobi took a
deep, intrigued breath as she slipped her feet into sandals.

“Why do you
ask?” she said, gathering her purse and a plastic sack of snacks. Judy’s
husband was out of town, and the two friends would catch an early movie before
Tobi left for work.

Inside, she
was thinking: Did you see him? Huh? Did you? But asking that would
probably color Judy’s objectivity.

“I thought
I saw a guy standing near your car. Then when I looked again, he wasn’t there.”

Yes yes
yes! He wasn’t even waiting until full dark anymore; it was only
sunset! Then again, Between Times like dusk and dawn, midnight and noon,
allowed the best magic because of the overlapping of worlds. Tobi asked, “What
did he look like?”

But Judy
knew her too well for that. She stopped in front of the door before Tobi could
open it. “What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell
you in the car,” promised Tobi—the movie would be starting with or without
them, and she did have her priorities. “But you may not believe me.”

“Hasn’t
stopped you before.” Suspicious, Judy nevertheless stepped aside so that Tobi,
after a last kiss for her cat, could head out.

Every step
down from her third-story apartment felt imbued with an extra awareness. The
path out to the parking lot, past neatly cut grass and an empty beer bottle,
seemed even more so. Tobi savored it as she’d been savoring it for two weeks.
It felt like expectation—like opening the mailbox on her birthday, or heading
out on a vacation, or picking up the phone when her Caller I.D. showed it was
someone she’d been hoping would call.

Someone
like a man?

Not just
any man.

Judy
unlocked her car by remote—it made a chirping sound and flashed its lights, as
if happy to see them—and Tobi climbed into the passenger seat, trying not to
search the surroundings for her guardian. She’d been seeing him on and off all
week, but never by looking directly at him. Always with her peripheral vision.

“You would
not believe the problems Bill had catching his plane,” Judy said as she started
the car, and went on with something about paper tickets and credit cards, none
of which Tobi wholly heard until, “You aren’t listening, are you?”

“Sort of,”
assured Tobi, her gaze just over the mirror out her window…so that, in
the mirror, she could almost see a dark-haired figure standing at the edge of
the parking lot, where they’d just come from. Bye, she mouthed fondly. See
you later.

Gods, but
he was gorgeous. His white T-shirt looked orange in the sunset.

“So he’s
like a ghost?” demanded Judy, circling the cineplex lot in search of a parking
space.

In the
Patrick Swayze sense? “Only in that he’s overlapping from another realm. But he’s not
the soul of a dead person, if that’s what you mean. I have a feeling he’s more
than just my creation—that I tapped into something bigger. Better, even. But I’m
not sure what that is, what he is.” Except mine. “I’m so excited
you saw him too.”

“Maybe
saw him,” Judy corrected. “I didn’t get a very good look.”

“My
witch-list will freak, all the same. Not many of them have ever had magic turn
out so…definitively. Well, except for Merlinna, but some of us have doubts
about her; her stories tend to sound like scenes from The Craft. You
know how the Internet is.”

“So you’ve
been e-mailing about this guy a lot?”

“And
dreaming about him—and I cast circles around my bed, to make sure nothing
dangerous gets in.” Though if an incubus looked like this guy, or like she felt
he did despite not remembering the dreams, would she mind? “I write down what I
can remember, as soon as I wake up, and it’s pretty interesting reading. For
me, anyway.” Things like he gets home tired but then we make out on the
couch and laughing with him, hiking by the river, he gives me his extra
water. “I wake up happy.”

“You sound
happy.” Judy’s voice had tightened and not, Tobi thought, because they were
still looking for a parking spot.

“You don’t,”
she noted warily.

“Should I
be? You’re more excited about this guy than you ever were about Joe.”

“All the
more reason to be glad Joe and I broke up. Jude, we’re going to miss the coming
attractions. Would you like me to…?” And Tobi rolled her fingers. Her
Parking-Space Song didn’t always work, but sometimes it helped. And it always
made them laugh.

“No. Last
time we tried that here, the power went out in the entire theater.”

Which had really
made them laugh. “I told you that wasn’t related. Probably.”

Giving up,
Judy pulled into a space some distance from the building and cut the engine. “Still.”

Tobi felt
frustrated. She wanted to gush about her hunky thought-form, and Judy was
practically radiating negativity. “You know I’m a careful magic user. It’s
never worried you before.”

“You’ve
never fallen in love with a figment of your imagination before.”

Tobi
considered that as they unbuckled, made sure their cola bottles and candy bars
were hidden deeply enough in her purse to smuggle in, got out of the car, and
started the long hike toward the theater. The day’s heat hovered over the
asphalt, despite that the sun had set. “One, the only people I’ve ever
fallen in love with have been imaginary. Think about it.” Even once when she’d
thought she was in real, corporeal love, it had been with someone she’d
imagined the man to be. If she added her favorite movie and TV heroes into the
mix…well, some of her sexiest moments had been wide-screen.

Judy didn’t
argue it.

“Two,” Tobi
said, “I am not falling in love with my thought-form.”

“You’re not
the only one with instincts.” Judy shook her head. “I think I’d rather you don’t
date at all than that you date someone make-believe.”

“I’m not
dating him,” insisted Tobi. “I can’t even see him except from the corner
of my eye.” Or asleep.

“Mm-hm.”
Judy bought the tickets, so that Tobi wouldn’t have to open her purse and risk
revealing their contraband. They got to the screen just in time for the coming
attractions, which ended the conversation for the moment. But the movie—a love
story—helped clarify things, all the same.

Tobi had
several theories about the magic of movies. One was that occupying one part of
the mind with fiction allowed a deeper part to work things through unimpeded.
Another was that a good romance connected viewers to Universal Love Energy. It
reminded people who were involved of their loved one, and soothed those who
weren’t involved, offering quiet assurance that romance really did exist.
Usually, Tobi fell into the latter category.

That
evening, she found herself in the former.

She wanted
to be with him. She felt like calling home and talking to him. Too bad he had
no voice. No phone number, even. No face! That she could see.

But she
would know it if she saw it.

When she saw
it.

Oh my.

“I think
you’re half-right,” she admitted to Judy afterward, still wrapping the softness
of the movie’s happy ending gently around herself. “I’m not falling in love
with my thought-form.”

“Good,”
said Judy. “But…?”

Tobi tested
the idea with words. “I think my thought-form is the one I’ve been in love with
all along.”

On top of
all that, it felt right. All she had to do was say, “It’s him,” and she got her
“magic shiver,” a delicious shudder down the spine, ending with a tingle in her
hands and feet. It meant potent powers were a’foot.

With a
chiming noise, a different name scrawled across their chat.

MERLINNAGURL:
Yu didnt do luv spell? I once did & wuz STOCKED!!!

Tobi
assumed she meant “stalked.” That happened with badly done love spells—not just
in the movies. She decided not to put energy into wondering whether it had ever
really happened to Merlinna. So she simply typed, No love spells. No names.

In fact, it
was standard to give a thought-form a name, but she hadn’t felt…qualified. As
if he already had a name, and it just wasn’t time for her to know it.
Yet.

B/C I’m in
love with someone, talking, caring, and he’s not even…. No. She
wouldn’t doubt his reality again. It would be like refusing to clap one’s
belief in fairies to save Tinkerbell. She deleted that, and settled on: He’s
not really here w/me.

CYBELEL63: Neither
am I.

She had a
point. An argument could be made that Cybele didn’t even exist at the same time
as Tobi; it was still yesterday in Hawaii. But she was real, and Tobi was real
to her. Now Merlinna….

The
computer chimed.

MERLINNAGURL:
Why not use names?

Luckily,
Cybele began to patiently explain the ethics against naming anybody but oneself
in any magic for which one did not have explicit permission. Normally, Tobi
would have joined her—it was for opportunities like this that they endured
Merlinna’s usual hubris. But if her thought-form was really, well…him…he
only had two weeks left of his visit.

Merry meet, she
typed, and signed off before Cybele had to bother responding.

She wanted
to go sit on the balcony, in the warmth of his presence, and wrap her hand in
the rapidly fading scarf.

#

Tobi made
extra effort to stay involved with the outside world, during the next two
weeks. It was partly precaution against dissociative behavior—magic or not, she
balked at crossing the line into mental illness—and partly preparation. When
the full moon came again, she had to take down and bury the scarf and release
the thought-form. She’d promised.

Better not
to have isolated herself when it happened.

So she
built houses with other Habitat for Humanity volunteers one weekend…but amused
herself with the image of the man she loved in a work-belt, shingling the roof
beside her.

She
resisted the temptation to take extra time off work, and was surprised when a
colleague asked if she was dating. “You’re wearing makeup,” he explained. “And
those are new clothes, right?”

She was,
and they were. She’d also bought herself flowers.

She went to
dinner with her family and enjoyed reminiscing about her late grandparents. Not
long before leaving, she turned down her big sister’s invitation to a party on
the 21st. “That’s Summer Solstice,” Tobi explained, thinking
quickly. “There’s a big festival going on at the lake.”

“Oh well,”
said Teresa, and shrugged. “Maybe some other time. It’d be nice for you to get
out and meet people.”

Other than
the people from work, from Habitat for Humanity, and all her friends? Not to
mention…. “It’s a big festival because people will be there.”

“I meant
normal people,” said Teresa, which led to their semi-annual,
no-such-thing-as-normalcy fight. Driving home, Tobi found herself justifying
her side of the argument to the empty passenger seat. She could almost hear a
man say, She worries because she loves you. Then, Who can blame her?

But the
parking lot was empty when she got home.

Her phone
was ringing as she reached her apartment—Judy. “Turn on Channel five. Fast!”

The
reporter was interviewing a young woman who’d had a close call with the mugger,
only half a mile from where Tobi lived. “But then he looked at the parking lot,
nervous, like someone was coming,” she gushed into the anchor’s microphone. “And
he ran off!”

They now
had a police artist’s drawing of the man’s face which, Tobi felt relieved, was
nothing like her guardian’s face at all. She might not be able to picture it
outside of dreams, but she knew she would recognize it.

Wow.

She went
out onto the balcony and fingered the scarf. It had faded to a pale blur of
pastel-faint color, and its edges had started to unravel. Not even a week left.
“You’re supposed to stay in this apartment complex,” she chided softly into the
night air. “We weren’t going to save the whole city.”

No answer,
of course. But she thought about the girl on the news, with her college t-shirt
and glasses, and she understood him all the same. She suspected that she
usually did.

“Good job,”
she added. She’d always known he was a hero.

When esbat—the
night of full moon—arrived, she received at least four e-mails and a telephone
call reminding her that she was loved, that her friends cared. All because the
visit of someone she may yet have imagined was ending. She knew she was
supposed to be depressed, but she felt…lucky.

She untied
the bleached remnant of the scarf from her railing, having to do deep breaths
and envision the knot sliding loose in order to manage it. Then, inside, she
readied for her ritual. She turned off the telephone ringers and turned down
the answering machine. She chose the same CD as before, lit incense, and set
out her quarter candles. She cast her circle, bid the presence of the four
elements and her gods, and finally kneeled before her altar, alone in her
circle and yet touched by so many people of her world and beyond. She felt a
strange lack of depression about this…but she could think of only one
person qualified to discuss it, and it was neither Judy nor Cybele.

“Perfect,”
she whispered, yet again.

Lying back
on her carpet, still in the safety of her circle, Tobi sank into guided
relaxation, feet first, then calves, knees, thighs…. until she’d reached a deep
and meditative state. She imagined herself surrounded by a brilliant silvery
light, protective and powerful. Then she envisioned a well beside her, into
which she tossed all the negativity of her week like a handful of dirty
pennies. She felt her astral form turning away, even as her concerns plunked
into the cleansing waters of this dream-world. Leaving her body was not
Tobi’s forte….

But when
she opened her eyes—her astral eyes—she found that the silvery light had become
a thick, gentle mist, surrounding her.

And then
she saw him.

The man’s
back became visible to her first, through the fog—his T-shirt, his jeans. She
knew that back, those shoulders. She knew that hair, as if her fingers had
buried themselves in it for countless lifetimes.

“It’s you,”
she whispered.

He turned
to face her, dark eyes lighting with recognition, and Tobi felt full force his
joy, acceptance—love. Probably because it was hers, too.

It was him,
all right.

“You were
expecting someone else?” he challenged, and she heard in his voice countless
endearments, night-times, lifetimes together. No wonder she hadn’t given up on
him.

“Never,”
she promised, going to him. She raised her hands to his chest, her fingers
curled slightly, afraid to really touch. Touch didn’t work the same way in the
astral realms. Surely it would disappoint. “But you’re taking your time, this
time around.”

“We agreed
to it before we started,” he reminded her gently, brushing a callused hand over
her hair. Clearly he didn’t follow the same no-touching-in-the-astral-realm
rules. “You probably don’t remember. My physical self doesn’t, either. The point
of incarnating is to forget and then re-learn, right? It’s part of the fun.”

“But I
remembered you,” she insisted. “Part of me has always remembered you.”

“Some
things are impossible to let go.” He drew his hand down her cheek now. “But it’s
time to pretend to, isn’t it? I can feel the moon.”

It took a
long moment, through the satisfaction of being with him again, to remember her
spell. “I’ve got to dismiss you from the task. I promised.”

He nodded. “You
always were handy with the couplets. Now, one more thing….”

And he
kissed her.

It was not
a physical kiss because they were not, at the moment, physical beings. It was
more. Deeper. It was a melding of their auras, their energies, their souls. She
felt surrounded by him, imbued with him…and as sure of him as she was of her
own heart. No wonder she wasn’t interested in looking elsewhere! This was worth
waiting lifetimes for.

Soon, she heard—or
felt—him promise. Now close it.

“If this be
correct, and allows others to be free: So I Will it, so I Shape it, and So Mote
it Be.”

She opened
her eyes to see the ceiling fan above her, shadowy in candlelight. Alone again…but
never completely.

Her body
wasn’t relaxed anymore.

Her toes
were curling.

#

By time
Tobi made it to the big Solstice Festival, she’d buried the scarf with the
original picture, been to another movie with Judy, and seen on the news that
the mugger had turned himself in. He’d said he felt he was being stocked.
Though he didn’t mention a dark-haired man in jeans and a white T-shirt, Tobi
had her suspicions.

At the
festival, she enjoyed spending the long, hot afternoon with other pagans—the
heat wouldn’t last forever, after all. A live band played Celtic music, with
anyone who’d brought a drum—and many had—joining in. Others clasped hands and danced
in circles, like a magical ring-around-the-rosie, the brave ones weaving in and
out under the arms of their companions. Almost everyone brought pot-luck for
the feast, from store-packaged cookies to homemade, vegetarian dishes.

Oz was
there, flirting with a white-haired earth mother and wearing a tank top which
read, “Things haven’t been the same since that house fell on my sister.” He
waved when he saw Tobi.

One woman,
who Tobi thought was HP—high-priestess—of a local coven, did a spontaneous
recitation of the Charge of the Goddess. It gave Tobi magic shivers, especially
the part which went: “For if that which you seek, you find not within yourself,
you will never find it without.”

Best of all
were the labyrinths. As Oz had predicted, the event organizers had created a
whole selection of them—a replica of the Chartres labyrinth, a Cretan “seven-circuit”
maze, and a “Medicine Wheel Walk” for those pagans on Native American paths.
The designs had been chalked into the grass like multi-faceted baseball diamonds.

Tobi chose
the replica of the labyrinth from Crete. It struck her as Greek…Pygmaliony.
Though resembling a maze, it only had one way in and one way out. She liked
that the point wasn’t to struggle through dead-ends and false turns. The point
was simply to choose one’s path and then trust it, to walk it deliberately…and
at one’s own speed.

As she took
steady steps between the chalk guidelines, she focused on letting go—of
societal expectations, of fears, of self-doubt. She realized, as she reached the
center, that she felt truly happy. Hot, but happy. Bug-bit, but happy. Alone….

But she
wasn’t alone. As she’d told her sister, it was a big festival. Besides….

A breeze
stirred the hair stuck to her neck, and she smiled as she sensed his presence. If
that which you seek, you find not within yourself….

“Merry
meet,” she greeted softly into the coming dusk. The standard pagan greeting was
short for Merry Meet, Merry Part, and Merry Meet Again. Why waste energy mourn
separations, when reunions would so surely follow?

Soon, he’d said.
She remembered that much.

“I’ll be
here,” she said. “I promise.”

Pygmalion’s
story ended happily, didn’t it? Why couldn’t hers?

Tobi turned
around and as she paced her way slowly across the grass, tracing the labyrinth
back out, she drew to herself: one, confidence. Two, happiness. Three, hope. He
was out there. She felt him, as surely as she felt the Goddess in the nearby
lake, the God in the late-sinking sun.

In the
meantime, she would enjoy the company, the sunshine, the day—then have her own,
solitary ritual later tonight.

She decided
to use Beach Boys music, and laughed. Whoever he was, he liked Beach Boys music
too.